Cena is a village sign language used by 34 known deaf signers and many more hearing inhabitants of Várzea Queimada, a small, agricultural community in the sertão (scrubland) of Piauí, north-eastern Brazil.
The existence of Cena is largely motivated by two key factors: a greater prevalence of congenital deafness in the local population relative to global or national averages, and the geographical isolation of the community, which until recently, existed for generations without a road connecting the cluster of villages to the region's highway.
Cena (literally: ‘scene’, the word used to refer to what signers recount with their hands as they sign) is indigenous to the community of Várzea Queimada, emerging after the birth of several deaf children in the village beginning in the 1950s.
[1] Despite the genesis story of Libras beginning decades prior to the birth of deaf children in Várzea Queimada, the geographical isolation of the community from large urban centres and deaf schools meant that these children grew up in the absence of a language model.
Unlike the gestural output of caregivers that deaf children receive in this context, homesign typically exhibits some properties more akin to language that solely gesture,[3] making such systems of particular note to the field of developmental linguistics in observing the extent of linguistic development in the absence of a language model.
However, the birth of multiple deaf children into an isolated community creates a context for a shared system to emerge.
Ongoing observation allows linguists to track the development of various levels of linguistic structure, considering existing research demonstrates that preferences for specific structures emerge quickly and differ over successive cohorts of signers in a young language.
[11][12] Interactions between some of these signers, including the telling of narratives, was the subject of the 2019 film Jogos Dirigidos (Directed Games), commissioned by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.
In general, word order varies according to the valency of the sentence – the number of arguments a verb takes.
Various aspects of the village's sociocultural practices and organization are covered in detail in the PhD thesis of Éverton Pereira.